Around March 30, 1848

On May 20, 1847, The National Era in Washington, D.C. contained an article concerning a surprising act of a man fro Prince George County, Maryland. Enlightened by the Marlborough (Maryland) Gazette, the Era learned that the heirs of the late John Townsend brought forth a case against the testator's will. The late Townsend caused uproar in the county with his proposal...

It seems that John Murrell of Lynchburg, Virginia, was often away from his Louisiana plantation. Murrell bought Tally Ho Plantation in Iberville Parish in 1848. The plantation was run by an overseer named L. Hewett, who communicated with Murrell through a series of letters, most posted to an address in Lynchburg and some to an address in New Orleans. In the letters, Hewett told Murrell about the...

Daily habits, such as flipping through a newspaper, must have been hard on an anti-slavery southerner. The newspapers prior to the Civil War are full of reminders that not all people were in fact equal. Two adds in The Valley Star (the primary newspaper in Lexington, Virginia) were surprisingly similar: one describing a lost horse and the other a lost slave. In Virginia at the time, the two were...

When we learn about slavery and the slaves’ masters we often get a picture of an evil cold hearted man, who would whip and torment slaves, while they worked in weather conditions that made it impossible to get any work done. We also often assume that their (the slaves) masters would force them to work whether they were sick or even near death. Using the plantation letters from the Cameron Family...

In 1849 a law was passed in the state of Delaware that threatened to sell free blacks into a year of servitude if they were "idle and poor" and remained unemployed. This law gave free blacks motivation to make a way for themselves.

Free blacks living in the State of Delaware during the antebellum era faced a number of experiences as they tried to make their own way. These unique...

The idea of the formation of a U.S. Department of Interior laid in the back of the mind of the U.S. Congress since the ratification of the Constitution in 1789. However, in the months following the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, the proposal reasserted itself as the federal government and its responsibilities expanded enormously. As a result, in the second session of the 30th Congress...

At the McKenzie College on the Texas frontier religion was taken seriously. The Reverend John Witherspoon Pettigrew McKenzie founded the school and was also its headmaster. Malcolm H. Addison attended McKenzie College and like most college students both past and present, he received letters from his parents. For Addison, the subject of these letters inevitably turned to a questioning of the status...

The devastation of cholera resumed in New Orleans on January 13, 1849 when the Medical Board pronounced that the disease had made its way into the levee. As was the case in the cholera epidemic of 1833, no one could explain why it had suddenly sprouted up again. There had not been many records indicating that ships from Europe had brought any cases of the disease in the most recent months. Theodore...

On April 15, 1847, The National Era printed an article publicizing one person's genuine act of kindness towards mankind. This person was no established politician providing aid for victims of the Irish Potato Famine; instead, he was a small five-year-old boy named Joseph Klemm. When Joseph's mother read him one disturbing account from Ireland, his first instinct was to run and get his moneybox....

For many enslaved people in the Deep South, slavery was the only way of life they had ever known. Regardless, stories of the North and specifically, a place referred to as Philadelphia, were incentive enough to prompt some to brave the terrifying unknown and escape the even more terrifying world in which they were already bound. At some point during the day - or perhaps it was the night - of April...